100 fastest growing inner city businesses

15. Sinu

16 of 101

2009 Revenues: $1.8 million

5-year Annual Growth Rate: 65%

CEO: Larry Velez

Location: New York, NY

Year Founded: 1999

About the business:While putting together an IT department at a media start-up company, Larry Velez saw a huge gap in the quality and availability of IT services for small businesses. Velez founded Sinu with the belief that small businesses should have access to affordable, enterprise-level IT services and that he was the person to deliver it.

When companies with fewer than 500 employees are growing, trying to save costs or struggling to replace a senior IT person that has left the company, Sinu tends to win a large amount of their business. Becoming their client's new IT department, Sinu takes over all IT functions by managing communications, data sharing, and security.

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) defines inner cities as core urban areas with higher unemployment and poverty rates and lower median incomes than their surrounding metropolitan statistical areas. For the 2011 list, ICIC received more than 2,000 solicited nominations using its database of small businesses and through the support of its nominating partners, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Staples, and the Small Business Administration. Companies were ranked by compound annual growth rate (CAGR) based on their revenue over the five-year period between 2005 and 2009 (the last year for which complete data was available).